Blog

This blog loads faster than 97% of all websites tested by Pingdom’s Website Speed Test as you can see in the report above. It wasn’t just naturally this fast, it took some effort. To save you time and help you speed up your WordPress site, I’ve outlined 19 specific ways you can do this on any WordPress driven web site. Some of these items will not be options if your web host doesn’t accommodate them, but most of them will be relevant regardless of your web host.

Sometimes it’s better not to minify your files, so test the load time with Pingdom’s Website speed test before and after enabling it, to determine whether or not it makes sense for your site. This is particularly true if you have a lot of CSS files being loaded, as one big group they can take a lot longer to load than they would separately.

Ideally you’ll be able to just bulk “smush” all your images. Yahoo’s Smush.it service tends to be a bit unreliable however. If it’s not working at the time, you can always run a GTmetrix report on your site and manually download the compressed version of the images it reports as not being optimized.

Third-Party Services for Load Time Optimization

Use a Content Delivery Network

Why use a CDN on your Blog?
A CDN (content distribution network) is useful for speeding up your website’s load time for your visitors, particularly users located far from your website’s server’s physical site. What it does is store your images, JavaScript & CSS files on locations throughout the world so they load faster via the closest POP (point of presence) site. This also helps reduce the amount of bandwidth your server uses. CDN service is relatively inexpensive with MaxCDN and free with CloudFlare and adds a lot of value, plus it’s easy to do, so why not do it? Anyone that takes their website seriously should use a CDN.

The problem is, some of your JavaScript files may not work properly if they’re moved to the footer. In this case you’ll have to move the JavaScript files to the footer on a case-by-case basis. You can do this utilizing the wp_register_script() & wp_enqueue_script() functions. These are normally found in the functions.php file of your WordPress theme. The fifth parameter in each function is $in_footer. As long as you set this parameter to true for both functions for a given script, the given script will then be loaded in the footer where the wp_footer() function is called in your theme’s template.

For example if you had the script prettyphoto being included as follows:

Share Your Results

Test your load time before following this guide. Once you have fully implemented these techniques, please share your results in the comments! Also, if you have any further recommendations I’d love to hear those too!

Andy Forsberg is a digital marketer in Minneapolis, MN and has been developing profitable websites for over 17 years. Andy is an expert at digital marketing and front-end web development. He is known for his Google Analytics, Salesforce, SEO & WordPress expertise. Andy is also the creator of the open source Sexy Author Bio WordPress Plugin (the plugin being used to present Andy's bio to you right now) and the Chrome extension that detects WordPress Themes and Hosts known as WPSNIFFER.

A note about jpg vs. png. Each type of image is different, so sometimes even gif is better if it is images like line drawings using only 256 colors. png is also sometimes better depending on the actual image. jpg filetypes are always best with photos. png is great for icons, and both png and gif support transparency but jpg images don’t.

Andy, do you provide site and page load optimization as a service? If so, please contact me at http://www.21stsoft.com. Much appreciated.

Validation errors are not important at all in the whole scheme of things. So long as your site renders properly on the important browsers and for the various mobile resolutions they’re essentially irrelevant and fruitless to bother fixing. If I spent my time worrying about them above more important things (i.e. content, seo, load time, mobile rendering, etc.) then my site probably wouldn’t be one of the top 45,000 most visited websites in the world.

Hey there. Great post, thanks for sharing the tips. I’ve used the pingdom tool and I can already see that I have a lot of room for improvement with my site speed. My window tinting company website is here: http://www.alphatinting.com. I’m not exceptional with the technical side of speeding up my site. I’ve used caching plugins and minifying plugins before, but sometimes I notice it breaks certain parts of my site. Is this something that you offer as a service? If not, is there a place where I can hire someone for a one-time optimization for site speed?

Thanks for this helpful post. I have spent a good bit of time on trying to speed up my page load, although with a photo-intensive food blog, it will never be perfect. Here’s my problem: Ads. I can’t move that javascript to the footer because I just stick the tags in wherever they need to appear. They are all asynchronous, so in a tool like gtmetrix, my page load looks somewhat decent, but pagespeed insights seems to look at the total load time including ads. Is there any way to set some sort of delay for all js to load, even ads? Thank you!

Thanks for this detailed article, very helpful for people speeding up their website (me). I was wondering if, besides pingdom.com and gtmetrix.com if you know of any other good other speed testers. So far I’ve come across http://www.webpagetest.org and http://www.giftofspeed.com but there don’t seem to be many other alternatives available? You know of some good ones? Thanks! Magnus